Impacts Of Online Brand Community On Customer Purchase Behavior And Word-of-Mouth

The advance of information technology has changed the way individuals interact with each other and is redefining the way firms connect with their customers. Spurred by the popularity of online forums, social’networking sites, and Internet user groups, firms are increasingly dedicating marketing budgets to create online brand communities and encourage customers to participate in such communities in hope that this will influence customer behavior, such as purchase behavior and word-of-mouth behavior. Despite the eagerness of firms to embrace online brand communities, empirical research investigating how an online brand community affects customer purchase behavior and word-of-mouth behavior still lags. This dissertation aims to address these issues and study the impacts of online brand community participation on customer purchase behavior and word-of-mouth behavior. It consists of three essays. The first essay addresses the inconsistent findings on the relationship between community participation and customer purchase frequency. Based on the regulatory focus theory, we examine how the effect of brand community participation on purchase frequency depends on customer regulatory focus and thus reconcile the mixed findings. The second essay explores the relationships between the ladder of participation in an online brand community and consumer purchase frequency and how individual regulatory focus moderates the relationships. Finally, the third essay investigates word-of-mouth behavior and studies how consumer engagement in an online brand community affects generating online product reviews and review ratings postconsumption. All of the essays are empirical research based on a dataset collected from an ecommerce company as well as its online brand community.